ibook display problems

I have a 14" ibook (1.4ghz late model) and the backlight on the display will not stay on. The computer is working fine (except for this) and the display works (you can see it faintly when shining a bright light on it) but the backlight is not on. The brightness settings are all the way up so that's not the problem. I also reset the pram which did nothing.. So then I tried resetting the nvram and restarted the computer. This actually worked and the backlight was on, everything running smooth for about 2 hours.. then the backlight randomly shut off again.
I tried resetting the pram/nvram like I did before but this time it did nothing and I cannot get the backlight to come on at all now.. It used to come on when I opened firmware setting but now it doesn't even do that.. Does this sound like a video card problem? Any other suggestions to try and fix this?

I don't know if this has anything to do with it but recently the computer also started making clicking noises for about 3 seconds when waking up from a sleep. sounds like it's coming from the optical drive so it's probably nothing..

 

I never really considered this but could it be possible that the backlight simply burnt out? I've used this computer for atleast 5-7 hours a day for about the past 4 years. This comes out to roughly 8750 hours of use and abuse.. I'm not sure what the average life is on the old lcd backlights and I've never personally seen one go out, do you think it's likely that it just burnt out?

 

I did some more research and think that it's actually the inverter board. I have a crack in the lcd bezel near the hinge that happend a long time ago and did not know the inverter board is located there. the cracked bezel probably got worse and did something to the board the other day. I am not looking forward to taking this thing apart, so many parts and screws on the ibook. I guess the good thing is that I can fix the bezel and inverter at the same time then have a brand new laptop again..